SCIP: Being in Britain

Being in Britain is part of a cross-national study of new immigrants in Europe.

This study is coordinated by the Institute of Sociology at the Georg-August-University in Germany, in collaboration with the University of Essex in the UK, Trinity College in Ireland, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The goal of this project is to better understand the challenges facing new immigrants in four European countries, UK, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands and how they adjust to their new homes. We are in the field, surveying immigrants in the greater London area. This webpage provides a brief introduction to the project as well as some information for participants in the survey.

Information for Participants

Have you been referred to Being in Britain as a potential participant? Do you have questions about the survey, the interviewing process, or the payment procedure?

Uczestnicy ankiety: zostańcie z nami!

شرکاء سروے: برائے مہربانی رابطے میں رہیں!

The Project

Being in Britain is part of a cross-national study of new immigrants in Europe. This study is coordinated by the Institute of Sociology at the Georg-August-University in Germany, in collaboration with the University of Essex in the UK, Trinity College in Ireland, and Utrecht Univeristy in the Netherlands.

The ultimate goal of the project to examine what happens to migrants in various national contexts, immediately following their arrival in a new country to live or work. A survey will be conducted with 7000 immigrants across the four target countries, who have lived in their respective receiving countries for only a short while, with a follow up after a year. This will enable researchers to answer unresolved questions about migration processes and the early experiences of migrants in a new country.

We are interested in a variety of migration topics, including social networks, religious and ethnic identification, language acquisition, attitudes and opinions about the UK and about the immigrant’s home country, and the experiences of new migrants at work and home. Our data will be unique, in that we can compare these outcomes across countries, allowing us to assess what countries can do to help new immigrants succeed. To increase our ability to compare across countries, we are focusing on only two immigrant groups in each country. In the UK we look at Pakistani and Polish immigrants, while Ireland concentrates on Polish immigrants; the focus in Germany is on Turkish and Polish immigrants, and in the Netherlands on Turkish, Moroccan and Polish immigrants. In each nation, we can compare the experiences of immigrants from a new EU country to those of immigrants coming from a country from which immigrants have been arriving for many decades.

The project is financially supported by the NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe) migration programme. NORFACE brings together a combination of 14 European funding organizations. The research will be conducted by an international project group comprising ten scientists from all the four research countries. The UK team comprises: